NCJ Number
234434
Journal
Journal of Forensic Sciences Volume: 56 Issue: 2 Dated: March 2011 Pages: 415-417
Date Published
March 2011
Length
3 pages
Annotation
The authors investigated in an age-controlled study the TH01 allele frequencies in 127 cases of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) and 406 control cases to assess whether in SIDS cases a distinct TH01 allele distribution could be determined as has been reported by a previous study.
Abstract
Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) constitutes a considerable percentage of infant death of unknown etiology. Individual catecholamine response variation is suspected to play a role in SIDS. TH01 is a tetrameric short tandem repeat marker in the tyrosine hydroxylase gene, which regulates gene expression and catecholamine production with allele 9.3 exerting a particularly strong effect on noradrenalin production. The current study found that genotypes containing one or two 9.3 alleles were significantly more frequent in SIDS patients (58.2 percent) than in control subjects (48.4 percent, p = 0.038), whereas all other alleles were more frequent in the control subjects. The study findings support the notion that there exists a significant association between TH01 gene configuration and SIDS. (Published Abstract)